“The Grand Old Party In Reverse”: Christie, Cuccinelli And What The GOP Didn’t Learn In 2012
Elections, the saying goes, have consequences. Of course, some have more consequences than others. Consider the 2012 election – and then ponder this week’s gubernatorial races. You’d imagine that the big nationwide election would do more to jar the GOP than a couple of off-year gubernatorial races. But given the right’s nonreaction to 2012, reality-based Republicans must hope otherwise.
Think back a year. Given the results of the 2012 elections – Barack Obama won re-election by 4 percentage points and 5 million votes; Senate Democrats gained seats, and House Democrats drew more votes (if not more seats) than House Republicans – you would not be faulted for thinking that the GOP was in for a course correction. And, for a brief while, it seemed likely. The Republican National Committee issued a postmortem with a slew of recommendations on how to turn the party around, with a focus on reaching out to female, minority and young voters. Washington pundits declared comprehensive immigration reform inevitable because Republicans had to do something to get on the right side of Hispanic voters. That was then. Now?
“At this point, we’ve gone backwards because of the government shutdown,” says Republican pollster Whit Ayres. “That doesn’t mean we can’t be resurrected in time to do very well in the 2014 elections given the gift of Obamacare. But it’s hard to look at the state of the party today versus Election Day in 2012 and think we’ve made much progress.”
What happened? The party leaders who wanted to adjust to the facts of reality were rolled by the alliance of the tea party and the right wing’s media-industrial complex, which is more interested in whipping up the base (and then fundraising off of it) than what movement conservatives like Erick Erickson derisively refer to as the “‘governing’ trap.” The Republican reboot was lost in a miasma of conservative windmill-tilting that culminated in the ill-conceived, predictably disastrous shutdown.
“They don’t care [about polls], but they need to care,” says Cook Political Report’s Jennifer Duffy. “When you need to pick up as many [Senate] seats as Republicans need right now, you can’t afford to have your brand hurt.” As former Rep. Tom Davis, a moderate Virginia Republican, said recently, “You’ve had the diagnosis, and now there’s the denial.”
When asked whether the GOP is better off a year later than immediately after getting trounced last November, one veteran Republican lobbyist offers that sometimes a party has to hit rock bottom. “At some point you have to cleanse your system,” the lobbyist says. “The question is how do you respond when you hit rock bottom?” The twin events of the dismal shutdown and this week’s contrasting gubernatorial elections give the GOP a fresh chance to hit the rock bottom reset button.
And there’s some hope that the 2013 elections will have the consequences that can finally penetrate the right’s bubble. Mitt Romney might have been challenging Obama in 2012, but he was also stalked by a phantasm of the right – a “true” conservative candidate that could set their hearts aflutter. The far right says “look, Romney wasn’t conservative enough … you need to shut the government down over Obamacare,” according to Davis. A true conservative, the theory goes, would have delivered the victory over Obama that the right wing fully expected right up until Fox News declared the president re-elected last year.
The 2013 elections, while more narrowly focused, present a starker contrast. You have conservative darling Ken Cuccinelli in the purple state of Virginia losing to Terry McAuliffe of all people; and you have New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, the Republican who literally embraced Obama last October after Superstorm Sandy, winning by a landslide in a true-blue state. As pollster Ayres said when asked about this scenario last week: “It certainly presents a pair of compelling case studies whose message is obvious to all who are willing to see.”
So where to from here? Two things to keep an eye on: First is the budget battle rerun due in January – to what extent is the Ted Cruz-led conservative cabal able to drive the party into another vain, self-destructive shutdown? Early signs give reason for skepticism. Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell, for example, has ruled out another shutdown. “Ted Cruz went out and led a parade that he said would be a success … and then he walked down the alley like that character at the end of ‘Animal House,’ marched the whole band into the wall – and then he ran out and had a TV interview,” says conservative activist Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, who adds that the next time Cruz has an idea, Republicans are either “going to throw something big at him” or otherwise politely dismiss him.
A second focus point will be the 2014 primaries. McConnell faces a serious challenge and a slew of other incumbents have primaries as well. “Rest well tonight, for soon we must focus on important House and Senate races,” former half-term Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin wrote on Facebook recently. “Let’s start with Kentucky – which happens to be awfully close to South Carolina, Tennessee and Mississippi – from sea to shining sea we will not give up.” The latter references were to GOP Sens. Lindsey Graham, Lamar Alexander and Thad Cochrane – all incumbents facing challengers. It’s early to say whether any are credible, says Duffy, “but for a collection of safe incumbents, that’s a lot of primaries.” If the primaries produce few or any upsets, it could mean the tea party’s influence has receded.
“Republicans are only one election and one candidate away from resurrection in 2016,” says Ayres. Time will tell.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, November 8, 2013
“Thank You For Your Service, Or Not”: Republicans Thank Veterans By Cutting Food Stamps
The next time I hear a Republican member of the U.S. House of Representatives thank a veteran for his or her service, I’ll hurl.
Veterans Day is on Monday. This year the holiday will come 10 days after cuts in federal food aid demanded by House Republicans go into effect. The cuts mean that 47 million hungry Americans, including almost 1 million veterans, will be even hungrier and more malnourished than they were last Veterans Day.
Mother’s Day won’t be much better because 80 percent, or 37 million, of the food aid recipients are women and children. And for the record, 10 percent or almost 5 million of the recipients are senior citizens.
I hope the House Republican budget guru, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., is proud of his handiwork because it’s a callous way of thanking vets for their service. Before the cuts, the average veteran received a little more than $4 a day for food from the feds. Now vets will have to get by on even less. Don’t try this at home, because if you try to eat on $4 a day, you will be malnourished pretty quickly. The GOP went to the mat to get these cuts and now they want even more.
The Republican hostility towards vets is just the latest episode in the sad saga of vets under the GOP. George W. Bush and his vice president Dick Cheney both avoided serving in Vietnam when they were of draft age in the 1960’s. But that didn’t stop the deadly duo from sending more than 4,000 brave young Americans to their deaths in Iraq based on a lie about the existence of weapons of mass destruction there.
If wounded soldiers were lucky enough to make it out of Iraq alive, things didn’t get much better back home. During the Bush/Cheney administration, hospitals administered by the Veterans Administration were poorly staffed and inadequately equipped. The corridors of the “crown jewel” of the military hospital system, Walter Reed Hospital, were plagued with garbage and rats.
The tea party caucus in Congress forced $5 million a year in cuts for food aid. Why? Because the GOP shot down President Obama’s proposal to eliminate $6 billion in federal tax freebies to oil companies and firms that own corporate jets. While millionaires, billionaires and oil company executives fly the friendly federal skies, almost 1 million veterans are still in the desert, fighting hard. This time they struggle in a fight for food in the land of plenty.
Thank you for your service!
By: Brad Bannon, U. S. News and World Report, November 8, 2013
“Far-Reaching Consequences”: Obamacare, Mental Illness, And Guns
After years of delays, the Obama administration has released final regs aimed at implementing 2008 legislation requiring “parity” in insurance coverage of mental illness, as Jackie Calmes and Robert Pear of the New York Times report today:
The rules, which will apply to almost all forms of insurance, will have far-reaching consequences for many Americans. In the White House, the regulations are also seen as critical to President Obama’s program for curbing gun violence by addressing an issue on which there is bipartisan agreement: Making treatment more available to those with mental illness could reduce killings, including mass murders.
Remember gun violence?
In issuing the regulations, senior officials said, the administration will have acted on all 23 executive actions that the president and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced early this year to reduce gun crimes after the Newtown, Conn., school massacre. In planning those actions, the administration anticipated that gun control legislation would fail in Congress as pressure from the gun lobby proved longer-lasting than the national trauma over the killings of first graders and their caretakers last Dec. 14.
But there’s another big piece of the puzzle that is necessary to make sure mental health benefits are available to the people most at risk of committing acts of violence: the Affordable Care Act. As Harold Pollack explained in a major article in the March/April 2013 issue of the Washington Monthly, the ACA’s Medicaid expansion alone is a really big deal for people with mental illness and/or addictions who are prone to violence:
Why do so many people at risk—many of them young low-income men—fail to receive appropriate mental health services? The most important single reason is this: most are categorically ineligible for Medicaid. These men are not custodial parents. They are not veterans. They have not (yet) been diagnosed with federally recognized disabilities. Many get into trouble because they have serious drug or alcohol disorders. Since 1996, substance use disorders are no longer qualifying conditions for federal disability programs….
This will begin to change in 2014. That’s when the ACA will start providing subsidies that will eventually reach thirty-three million Americans without health insurance. An estimated sixteen million will eventually be covered by expanded Medicaid to low-income Americans with incomes below 138 percent of the federal poverty line. That number will include the hundreds of thousands of mentally ill men cycling in and out of places like Chicago’s Cook County Jail and sleeping on grates in cities from Washington, D.C., to Seattle. For the first time, nearly all of these individuals (undocumented immigrants are the big exception) will gain access to regular health care. Moreover, if the law is properly implemented, these same individuals will gain access to mental health services that can reduce their propensity to commit violent acts.
So if you want some very good news about the impact of Obamacare, and some very bad consequences if it fails to be fully implemented, there you are.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Washington Monthly Political Animal, November 8, 2013
“What Really Matters”: Don’t Knock Obamacare Until You Try It
There has been a steady drumbeat of news stories about health insurance companies informing customers that their policies will be dropped or that they will face steep rate increases due to requirements of the Affordable Care Act.
This has opened the door to fair criticisms that President Obama wrongly stated that people would be able to keep their current insurance policies if they are happy with them, as this isn’t necessarily the case. However, the real question for individuals facing rate hikes or dropped coverage is whether there are insurance options provided through the exchanges, mandated by the new law, that these people would actual prefer, thanks to some combination of lower prices and more generous benefits. Obamacare might cause some to lose their current policy, but it also might provide them with options they would prefer. That is what really matters.
People should remember that the program provides subsidies for lower income individuals and families. At least in states that have accepted the very generous federal contribution, Obamacare also expands access to Medicaid. For many people who currently lack insurance, a group of people who tend to be poorer, Obamacare insurance policies will be free or relatively cheap.
The initial implementation of Obamacare has not gone smoothly. The key problem is website difficulties faced by people who are attempting to see just how much a plan will cost them, and whose attempts to actually sign up for a policy have been thwarted. We will see if these problems are fixed in a timely fashion, and whether other serious problems crop up.
But the program, as designed, is intended to lower prices for the vast majority of people on the individual insurance market, as well as to open it up to people who previously have been denied affordable coverage because of pre-existing medical conditions. Optimistically, increased competition could even lower prices for employer-based health plans.
Admittedly, such optimistic predictions might not come to pass. Over the next several months we will get a better idea of how many people manage to enroll, whether their coverage is adequate, and whether their overall medical costs, including premiums and out of pocket costs, fall. We might ultimately declare Obamacare a failure, and if that happens we should figure out a better way to expand access to affordable health insurance and care.
Despite the rhetoric from many conservatives, Obamacare isn’t the way most self-described liberals would reform our health care system. It is needlessly complicated, not guaranteed to reduce overall medical costs significantly and its subsidies, while significant, are too stingy. People with lower middle class incomes will still likely find the premiums to be a budgetary strain. At the very least, liberals would have included a government run “public option,” a Medicare-like program that would have competed with the private insurance.
But problems aside, people who are currently navigating the private insurance market –both those without health insurance currently and those who might be receiving scary policy and price change letters from their current insurance companies — should make sure to see just what their Obamacare options are. They might be pleasantly surprised.
By: Duncan Black, USA Today, November 5, 2013
“An Obvious Problem”: Chris Christie Needs Republicans To Have A Terrible 2014
I wouldn’t say that New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is the presumptive frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016—though, like Ross Douthat, I’m not sure who could beat him—but it is true that he is the official candidate of the GOP establishment. And, with a reelection coalition of Republicans, Democrats, young people, Latinos, and African Americans, Christie stands as the only potential presidential nominee that can claim a credible path to victory.
It doesn’t come as a surprise, then, to learn that his rivals are already throwing shade in his direction. NBC News has a good round-up of the Republican presidential contenders who have opened fire on the New Jersey governor:
Even after the disaster of the shutdown and Ken Cuccinelli’s loss in the Virginia gubernatorial race, the operating assumption of right-wing Republicans is that success will come when conservatives take a doctrinaire approach to their ideology. The available evidence makes clear that this isn’t true—Ted Cruz, for instance, won his election, but he underperformed Romney—but this doesn’t matter to either the GOP base or lawmakers like Cruz.
This poses an obvious problem for Christie. Insofar that his message of electability has any chance of resonating with Republican primary voters, it will be because they have given up the quest for purity, and are desperate to win, which means that, for Christie, the best thing that could happen is for Republicans to have a terrible 2014. If the GOP continues down its path of extremism, and loses its shot at capturing the Senate as a result, Christie has perfect ground for making his pitch.
Unfortunately for him, the more likely outcome is that Republicans do pretty well. The combination of a sluggish economy and voter discontent will hurt incumbents, which threatens the Democratic majority in the Senate and precludes the party from making real gains in the House. And a GOP base that does well—or even okay—in next year’s midterms is one that doesn’t have much interest in Christie’s message.
By: Jamelle Bouie, The Daily Beast, November 7, 2014
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